This is Fallout. It's what popped into my head when I imagined a guy running away
If you want players to do something, you need to make it easy enough that it isn't overly punishing, and isn't dramatically harder than the alternative. If it's harder to run away from a combat encounter than fight, the players are going to fight to the death rather than run away. It isn't enough to tell the players "not all fights are designed to be won", you need to provide mechanical support for this concept.
But you also don't want getting away from a combat to be costless, otherwise there aren't any stakes. There has to be an element of risk, even if the odds are tilted in favor of players.
But I also don't want it to be completely up to a roll of the dice. Otherwise you get one of those cases where the players flub the perception test (or surprise roll, or whatever) to spot the monster, flub the reaction roll, lose initiative, get beaten to a pulp in the first round, and then on top of all of that, fuck up the roll to escape the fight and get mutilated.
So the way I handle it is
When player characters run away from combat, each rolls a D20 and adds the number of empty slots they have in their inventory. Their pursuers (if the NPCs chase them) each roll a D20 and add any bonuses they get from their movement speed (default +0, up to +5 for a speedy foe, +10 for a blazing fast one).
If a character is overencumbered, subtract the number of excess slots from their D20 roll.
Escapees who roll lower than their pursuers are forced back into combat for one round, before they have a chance to try and escape again. Escapees who beat their pursuers are able to get away.
If a player (or NPC) fails to escape pursuit, they may elect to drop encumbering items equal to the difference between their roll and that of the pursuer, in order to escape that round.
Get a bonus to your roll to escape for running through an uncharted area, but run the risk of triggering traps or running into other monsters. You can choose to do this after you roll and fail to escape.
A clever solution (I cut the rope bridge with my axe once everyone’s across!) might just succeed automatically.
When dragging an incapacitated character, the person doing the dragging rolls to escape pursuit as normal, but subtracts the number of items carried by the character being dragged from their total. They may improve their odds by leaving behind the victim’s backpack, weapon, etc.
If the players pursue fleeing enemies, it is the same, but roles are reversed.
I'm sure this has been done before in some format, but I'll talk about why I did it like this.
The key is that the players have the ability to make choices after a failed die roll to turn it into a success, at the cost of spending a resource or endangering themselves in some other way. Either throw away some items to move faster, or run into an uncharted area and potentially get in even more trouble.
We can imagine assigning other bonuses and penalties based on things like the player characters' movement speed, where a faster than average character gets a bonus to the roll and a slower than average one (dwarves for example get a malus to their speed in various editions) gets a penalty.
The rules for dragging an incapacitated character omit the weight of the character and only count the weight of their carried items. I erred on the side of making the rules less punishing here because I've seen players get endlessly tarpitted by creatures with stun or paralysis abilities - unable to stand and fight, unable to retreat if they have to haul a downed ally out of the fray, and unwilling to abandon a friend. While the dilemma of leaving a wounded comrade behind to escape yourself is a rich vein of drama to tap, it's not the kind of drama everyone always enjoys.
This isn't a perfectly generic system. It assumes a couple things about your dungeon crawling game:
- It uses a D20 roll over system
- It uses a slot based encumbrance system
If your game doesn't use a D20, you can modify the math so that the sizes of the bonuses and penalties isn't overwhelming. So if you use a D10, divide by two. If you use a D6, divide by three or four, depending on if you want to round up or down.
If your game doesn't use slot based encumbrance, things get trickier. I'm personally of the opinion that non slot based encumbrance (that actually tracks pounds and ounces) is mathematically annoying enough that in practice it's usually ignored where it appears in rules. But I know that some people play games with digital character sheets that might auto-calculate stuff like carry weight of items, making those rules more practical. So there might be people out there who do use pounds and ounces encumbrance, and this system isn't going to help them at all.
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